THE FALL TV season officially kicked off Sunday, meaning that televisions with digital recorders can sag under the weight of even more must-see programs that undoubtedly will be recorded but never watched.
Don't get me wrong -- we love this technology, so much so that TiVo, the company that pioneered it in 1999, has become a verb. No matter what kind of digital video recording system we have (and by the end of this year there will be an estimated 22.1 million users) we do not record shows, we TiVo them. Moreover, the phrase "watching television" has morphed into "watching TiVo," a semantic shift that might soon eliminate terms such as "boob tube" and "idiot box" from our pop cultural lexicon. And it was already bad enough that no one uses the word "algophilist" anymore.
TiVo sounds like the name of a pet beagle. That's apt because, like a loyal dog, DVR technology is nothing if not patient. Part personal shopper who knows our tastes better than we do, part complacent spouse who keeps our dinners warm no matter what time we stumble home at night, DVRs offer a convenience we increasingly feel we cannot live without. But like many conveniences of a technological nature -- cellphones, BlackBerrys, laser hair removal -- it also introduces yet another form of burdensome maintenance into our lives.
In other words, if you already feel guilty about your piles of unread Sunday newspapers and New Yorker magazines, there's a new form of self-loathing: TiVo tyranny. Ever since I got a DVR system, my television has become a source of dread. No longer a symbol of slothful refuge wherein I can while away a few hours watching whatever dreck happens to be on, it is now a taskmaster. My life is not only cluttered with unanswered e-mails, unreturned phone calls and unfinished novels but entire seasons of television shows I feel I should watch but haven't and probably never will.
At this moment, my TiVo-generated roster includes every episode ever aired of "Weeds" and "Big Love," three months of "The Daily Show," five "South Parks" and several documentaries on subjects such as hybrid corn. Meanwhile, the show everyone's been talking about, "The Wire," escaped my notice entirely. It remains unrecorded, and I remain shamefully clueless.
Studies -- including some conducted, oddly enough, by TiVo -- have shown that DVRs do increase the number of hours people spend watching television. But according to Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrest Research, the real news is that DVRs get affluent people to watch more television.
